Content and Justification

Philosophical Papers

Paul A. Boghossian

Gathers together essays from one of the world's most distinguished philosophers

Includes widely discussed previously published papers and also draws new conclusions

Key topics in the central areas of philosophy

Follows in the wake of his highly successful Fear Of Knowledge (OUP, 2006)

Content and Justification

Philosophical Papers

Paul A. Boghossian

Description

Content and Justification presents a series of essays by Paul Boghossian on the theory of content and on its relation to the phenomenon of a priori knowledge.

Part one comprises essays on the nature of rule-following and its relation to the problem of mental content; on the intelligibility of eliminativist views of the mental; on the prospects for a naturalistic reduction of mental content; and on the currently influential view that meaning is a normative notion.

Part two includes three widely discussed papers on the phenomenon of self-knowledge and its compatibility with externalist conceptions of mental content.

Part three concerns the classical, but ill-understood, phenomenon of knowledge that is based upon knowledge of meaning or conceptual competence.

Finally, part four turns its attention from general issues about mental content to an account of a specific class of mental contents. It contains two widely discussed papers on the nature of color concepts and color properties.

Content and Justification

Philosophical Papers

Paul A. Boghossian

Table of Contents

Introduction1. The Nature of Content 1. The Rule Following Considerations2. The Status of Content3. Naturalizing Content4. Is Meaning Normative?5. Rules, Meaning, and Intention2. Content and Self-Knowledge 6. Content and Self-Knowledge7. The Transparency of Mental Content8. What the Externalist can Know A Priori9. Further Reflections on the Problem of Self-Knowing3. Content and the A Priori10. Analyticity Reconsidered11. Does an Inferential Role Semantics Rest Upon A Mistake?12. Knowledge of Logic13. How Are Objective Epistemic Reasons Possible?14. Inference and Insight15. Blind Reasoning16. Epistemic Analyticity: A Defense4. Colour Concepts 17. Color as a Secondary Quality18. Physicalist Theories of Color19. Postscript on Color

Content and Justification

Philosophical Papers

Paul A. Boghossian

Author Information

Paul A. Boghossian gained his PhD from Princeton University in 1987. He is Silver Chair of Philosophy at New York University. His research interests are in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language and in epistemology. He is the author of numerous works on a variety of topics, including color, rule-following, eliminativism, naturalism, self-knowledge, a priori knowledge, analytic truth, realism, relativism, the aesthetics of music and the concept of genocide.

Content and Justification

Philosophical Papers

Paul A. Boghossian

Reviews and Awards

"Content and Justification is a wonderful collection that brings together fourteen of the more important essays Paul Boghossian has written over the past twenty years.... many of the essays contained in this volume have been incredibly influential and as each one of them repays careful study it is not hard to recommend this volume to philosophers interested in epistemology and the philosophy of mind or language.... the essays contained in this volume are all excellent, the older essays provide an excellent gateway into debates concerning thought content and self-knowledge, and the newer essays will surely generate literatures of their own in the near future."--Clayton Littlejohn, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews